Lifelogging. (Sigh, just sigh.)

Samuel Pepys? Benjamin Franklin? Mary Chestnut? Charles Darwin? Anne Frank? A wimpy kid?

Come on! Get with it!

Who’s got time to read these days. Who’s got time to write?

Boring, boring, boring.

It’s, like, like life lived in black and white. Without any visual interest.  Sedentary, not action packed.

Writing gives you carpal tunnel. Reading gives you lard ass and squinty eyes.

Who needs it? Who wants it?

And who trusts diarists, anyway? Like bloggers, they’re filtering as they go, picking which perceptions they find worth perceiving, selecting their own personal fictions.  Editing out the stuff that they think isn’t relevant or, worse yet, those secretive cowards, the stuff they don’t want us to know. The stuff they don’t want us to see.

You want honesty? I’ll give you honesty!

You want real life? I’ll give you real life!

You want memories that you don’t have to remember? I’ll give you memories you don’t have to remember.

I’ll give you Memoto, the tiny little camera that you clip on and go. It takes two pictures a minute and uploads them to the cloud, so that you have a visual record of every little jot and tittle of your life that you can comb through whenever you want or need to know what the guy with BO standing next to you on the subway looked like.  How the checkout gal at Trader Joe’s scanned your items. Just how the terry towel hung on the back of the hotel bathroom door you were staring at because you forgot to take a magazine in with you when you had to go.

Magazine? Did I really say magazine?

Hah!

Who has time to read?

And as for the old fogeys who have time to write: If they have time to write, they must be leading pretty uneventful and stultifyingly boring lives. So, even if you did have time to read, why would you want to read them anyway?

What I meant was that your smartphone was charging, and you hadn’t unpacked your iPad. And some bully had called you “Four Eyes” and knocked your Google Glass off your face, crunching them under his loutish, bullying foot. So there you were with absolutely nothing to do while sitting on the pot other than staring at the bathroom door.

Sheesh!

At least you’ll always have a record of the hotel that was so ridiculously lame that they didn’t have a TV – or at least one of those no-choice broadcasting devices they have in elevators and taxi cabs – for you to watch while doing your business, in case you had foolishly sat down without your iPhone or iPad I hand, or your Google Glass on head.

Thanks to Memoto, you can spend the rest of your life photographing everything in front of you, including the good half of the rest of your life that you spend looking through those pictures so you can remember the part of your life that’s already happened.

My brain is exploding at the thought of all this looking at pictures of the pictures I’m looking at of the pictures I’m looking at of the pictures I’m looking at…

Who needs mirrors to explain infinite regression?

The Memoto camera is a tiny camera and GPS that you clip on and wear. It’s an entirely new kind of digital camera with no controls. Instead, it automatically takes photos as you go. The Memoto app then seamlessly and effortlessly organizes them for you.

But what happens if you don’t want to take photos of the time when you’re actually going going? Or making love? Or looking into the casket of someone you loved?

The camera has no buttons. (That's right, no buttons.)

Does this mean that, if you don’t remember to take it off, there’s no way to turn it off?

As long as you wear the camera, it is constantly taking pictures. It takes two geotagged photos a minute with recorded orientation so that the app can show them upright no matter how you are wearing the camera. And it’s weather protected, so you don’t have to worry about it in inclement weather.

The camera and the app work together to give you pictures of every single moment of your life, complete with information on when you took it and where you were. This means that you can revisit any moment of your past.

There are plenty of moments of my past that I’d like to revisit.

And the older I get, when the before is longer (and no doubt more adventure-filled) than what’s ahead, those moments of revisitation come on a lot more often. But I am able to take care of them in several ways that don’t require having a pictorial record of them. One is using my mind’s eye. Another is talking to friends and family about whatever it I want to revisit.

I’ll admit, I do enjoy looking through old photos now and then, and especially like to see one that I’ve forgotten about, or have never seen. One that jogs a memory. This is generally a sweet experience. Similar to finding a beloved Golden Book at a flea market, and having its brilliant illustrations take me back (gulp!) 60 years. Or smelling something that triggers a memory: That’s just what Jane’s house always smelled like! Wonder what happened to Jane?

But the thought of having two picture a minute of my life strikes me as the most wretched of wretched excess.

Yes, but, Memoto argues, with this little camera you’ll be able to:

Remember every moment.

Perhaps the young brainiacs at Memoto have not yet done anything they regret, or witnessed anything they’d like to forget, but who in the world wants to remember every moment?

I still regret telling my kid brother – he was two, I was eight – that he was going to get leukemia because he’d licked a spider web.

I realize that the unexamined life is not worth living, but do I really want to remember every moment of it?

Of course, lifelogging will no doubt prove to be one of those breakthrough advances that I will Luddite-ly scorn and resist, while the canny folks with their fingers on the pulse of the digital natives – the Me Generation? – zestfully embrace it.

At least they did on Kickstarter, where last fall’s attempt to raise $50K yielded $550K.

Am I the only one who pictures this:  Fast forward a generation or two and the only folks who are able to read and write are the ultra-elite, for whom it is a pastime that differentiates them from the proles, and a handful of academics who study lost languages. Meanwhile, the brains of the masses have lost the capacity to think analytically or creatively. It’s all in the moment, or all in how we recorded the moment. Lascaux cave dwellers without the ability to draw, but with a continuous real-time record of everything that appeared in front of our camera.

Sigh, just sigh…